Parents, grandparents celebrating family with tattoos

Increasingly, portraits of children, grandchildren and more being inked on more people

January 18, 2012|By Amanda Marrazzo, Special to the Tribune

Logan Seballos, 3, looks over the shoulder of his grandmother, Suzanne Willard, 46, in Willard's Streamwood, Ill., home. Willard has tattoos of her grandson and her daughter, Tanya, now 24. (Keri Wiginto)

About five years ago, Suzanne Willard spent a few hundred bucks and bought herself a one-of-a-kind Mother's Day gift.

It wasn't diamonds or pearls or a fancy red sports car. It was a portrait of her grown daughter, Tanya, tattooed on her right shoulder blade as she looked when she was 8.

A couple of years later Willard had a sundial tattooed on the back of her neck. The dial is set at 8:12 a.m., the time her grandson — Tanya's son — Logan was born. Shortly after that she had the image of the toddler, then 2, tattooed on her left shoulder blade.

Willard, 46, of Streamwood, is among a growing group of women who are stepping it up from the traditional scrapbook and monogrammed baby blanket as ways to remember their children and grandchildren and are getting tattooed. And some men are doing likewise.

Tony Carrillo, of Top Notch Tattoos in Elgin, who did Willard's artwork, said such tattoos are the ultimate expression of love.

"They want to remember their kid at a certain age. They want to show their love for family, for the kid," said Carrillo, who plans on having his own two children's portraits tattooed on his body soon.

Willard's tattoos sprang from a discussion she and a friend were having one day about money, and that led to talk about things you can take with you when you die and things you cannot.

And it was that chat that eventually led her to have images of her loved ones — Tanya, now 24, and Logan, now 31/2 — permanently inked onto her body.

"My tattoos are always a part of me," said Willard, a teachers assistant in Canton Middle School in Streamwood. "I always have my babies on my back. The biggest thing (I was thinking) is they'd always be there. I always have a glimpse of them in the mirror. People make comments about them and it just makes me feel good."

Though she has other tattoos, the ones of her family, which cost about $600 each and took about 10 hours each to complete, are the most endearing, she said.

Carrillo said that when he began as a tattoo artist 10 years ago, tattoos were considered more of an underground art form.

But today, he said, everyone from doctors and lawyers to grandmothers are expressing themselves and commemorating their loved ones through tattoos. He has seen women have up to three generations represented by tattoos: children, parents and grandchildren.

Beto Gallardo, who also works at Top Notch Tattoos, said he has seen more women being tattooed in recent years with their children's names, birth dates, initials, portraits and even their baby's footprints.

Gallardo said that recently a grandmother in her 70s came in and had her first tattoos done. The tattoos were names of a niece and a granddaughter inside a banner. Above the banner was the image of a little angel. She later came in and had Carrillo tattoo on her leg a portrait of her grandson, who had recently died.

David Fitzgerald, owner of the Bridgeport Tattoo Co. on Chicago's South Side and a tattoo artist for 20 years, said he thinks women are becoming more comfortable with showing off their tattoos.

He said there is a variety of subject matter women choose to have displayed on their bodies, but for mothers, their children are a common theme in tattoo art. He said in a recent week he also did tattoos for two women whose children had died. One read "Rest in Peace" and had an angel, the child's birth date and date of death.

"(There's) a great bond between a mother and a child and they like to wear that sort of emotion on their sleeve," he said.

To show her bond, Jamie Cisco, 36, of Streamwood, had two butterflies tattooed onto the right side of her chest to celebrate her two oldest children.

Each tattoo is red and yellow, one has a "B" for son Ben, 9, and the other a "G" for daughter Grace, 7. Ben's butterfly has more red on it than the other because that is his favorite color, and Grace's has more yellow — her favorite color, Cisco said.

Cisco will one day get two more tattoos for her two younger children, just 1 and 3, but said she is waiting until they can tell her what their favorite color is first.

Cisco chose butterflies because "they are pretty and they symbolize new life and hope ... they soar."

"I wanted something that really commemorated and showed what an important part of my life they are," she said. "Once you have children you are just never the same. I wanted some kind of permanent mark to show they would always be with me, no matter what, no matter how big they got, no matter how far away they went. ... They are my kids."